proj-oot-bootReferenceOld201018

1. Boot (Oot Boot) reference

Version: unreleased (0.0.0-0)

Boot is a low-level 'assembly language' virtual machine (VM) that is easy to implement.

1. # Introduction

Boot is a target language that is easy to implement on a wide variety of platforms, even on very primitive bare metal, or 'on top of'/within an existing high-level languages such as Python.

Highlights:

• 3-operand fixed-length register machine
• signed 32-bit integers
• integers and pointers both have implementation-dependent sizes in memory, and may be different sizes
• opaque pointer representation
• 7 integer registers, 7 pointer registers, 15 opaque registers to copy values of any type, and a zero register, and a null pointer register
• <=64 instructions
• RISC-like; no addressing modes (or rather, each instruction has one fixed addressing mode), and only a few instructions access (non-register) memory
• instructions for I/O, memory allocation, and calling to and from host platform
• the extension BootX?